


Alien (play an illegal song and turn it up louder)

by Marvelite5Ever



Category: Young Avengers (Comics)
Genre: DJ!Noh-Varr, Gen, I don't feel like this fact is ever done justice, Noh-Varr is an alien, Noh-Varr is awesome, Noh-Varr is completely alone in the multiverse, Noh-Varr is not human, but he owns that fact about himself, headphones are awesome, human emotions are complicated, music is awesome, music is love, this fact is also not done enough justice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-03
Updated: 2016-10-03
Packaged: 2018-08-19 06:23:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8193550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marvelite5Ever/pseuds/Marvelite5Ever
Summary: Noh-Varr is an alien. And he spends every minute—every nanosecond—of his time on Earth acutely aware of that fact: he is not human.





	

**Author's Note:**

> **Full Summary:** Noh-Varr is an alien. And he spends every minute— _every nanosecond_ —of his time on Earth acutely aware of that fact: _he is not human._
> 
> And he can no more understand their experiences than they can understand his. 
> 
> Their lack of understanding causes them to hate him—because humans hate that which is different from themselves, with such passion that they cannot even tolerate members of their own race whom really don’t differ from them so greatly—so he doesn’t take it personally that they can’t tolerate _him_ , a being of an alien race so divergent as to be beyond their meager means of comprehension; meager human means of comprehension that are so troglodyte to him that he cannot even begin to fathom it, what goes on in their minds. 
> 
> But his lack of understanding of human nature is what keeps him there, lingering on Earth-616 when he could be anywhere, in any dimension, at any point in the timestream. 
> 
> Because if the Kree are anything, they are scientists. And Noh-Varr has come to think of the humans on Earth-616 as his personal observational study. 
> 
> And he will wait, because he doesn’t want to miss anything. And he will watch them as they advance their species until they become a dominant race in the universe—or until they completely and utterly destroy themselves, a vast majority of the life on their planet, and possibly even the ability for anything but cockroaches to survive there ever again.
> 
> * * *
> 
>  **AN:** Basically I wanted to write something emphasizing Noh-Varr’s alienness. I think it’s really a shame that in the comics, what is always emphasized about aliens is their humanity. It’s either very egotistical of us, and/or very unimaginative of us, to assume that alien species would and should be like ourselves. 
> 
> So this is my attempt to make Noh-Varr alien while still keeping to canon and the human aspects they’ve shown of him.

* * *

**Alien (play an illegal song and turn it up louder)**

* * *

Nobody looking at the DJ at the back of the club would have suspected that he wasn’t human. 

He looked like a human, sounded like a human, acted like a human. Sure, his hair was white, but it could have been dyed. His eyebrows were dark, after all. And there was absolutely nothing else one would notice at a glance, or even over the course of a conversation. 

Maybe away from the colorful lights fragmenting the dark dancefloor, someone would notice that his eyes were too green, absent of any flaws, any flecks of brown or blue. Maybe they would notice that those too-green eyes noticed too much. Maybe they would notice that those too-green eyes shot to exactly where a projectile would land before it had even left the offender’s hand. 

Maybe away from the deafening throb of the music, someone would notice that his speech was too practiced, that there was an accent carefully hidden, that the edges of his words clicked and hissed when he was agitated or not paying attention, that he enjoyed drawling out sounds, slurring them together, like it was something new to him. 

Maybe away from the hot, sweaty mass of gyrating bodies, someone would notice that his movements were too fluid, too conscious, too controlled; that when he was surprised his relaxed posture would revert to that of a soldier, that the expression of soft happiness tore away like a mask and the hardened, blank-eyed expression that took its place seemed to belong there, that the sneer came a second later and uprose on his lips like a rebellion. 

But none of this screamed that he was an alien. It might suggest that his life had not always been filled with music and dancing, that it had more likely been consumed by fighting and diplomacy. 

Maybe, if someone were standing close to him when he was ticked off, they’d hear him muttering under his breath in an unrecognizable language, impossible sounds slipping from his tongue. But that still didn’t signify that he was necessarily an alien—over 7,000 languages and dialects were spoken on Earth, after all. He could easily have been simply been foreign, a human from some other part of the world.

Maybe if someone came to the party early, they’d see him moving the loudspeakers with too much ease, notice the way his abundant muscles hardly flexed with the effort. Maybe, if they were watching closely, they’d see him standing on one side of the room, only to appear suddenly on the opposite side, his white hair fluttered by a nonexistent breeze, the only evidence that he hadn’t always been standing there. 

But even if someone noticed that he was too strong, too fast to be human, that still didn’t peg him as an alien. He could have been a mutant, or any manner of superhuman. 

But the fact was that Noh-Varr wasn’t superhuman, because he wasn’t _human_. He was Kree, and he wasn’t even a Kree from the same dimension as all the humans around him; he had powers and abilities far beyond that of the Kree that the humans of Earth-616 were familiar with. 

Maybe that was the trouble. He was an alien of a completely different species, a completely different dimension, divergent from humans down to every thread of his genetic makeup. But everyone still expected him to be human. 

There were no differences to make it obvious that he wasn’t human. But there were differences, in his beliefs, his thoughts, his behaviors—just enough to make people hate him. 

If someone interacted with him enough, they’d start to become disturbed by him, frustrated by him, scared of him, angry at him, and for a while he didn’t understand why. He’d learned their language. He mimicked their behaviors. He looked human, sounded human, acted human. 

When he finally realized why they hated him, he was listening to music. 

Noh-Varr came from a dimension where there was transcendental peace and universal enlightenment. But there was no music. 

He had pondered why that was. How could the perfect world he’d come from not have something as amazing as music? How could something so amazing be created by humans, with their barbaric societies, their inferior intelligences, their rudimentary technologies? 

Humans, in their study of music, had discovered that music activated both the pleasure centers of the brain, the centers that were also activated by food and sex, as well as the intellectual part of the brain that enjoys solving puzzles and correctly predicting patterns. Music affected the emotions, in such a way that one could feel pleasure even when listening to sad or angry music, and feel calmer afterward. 

The Kree were a logical species. They were ruled as a militaristic dictatorship, and their permanent ruler was the organic computer-construct that preserved the brains of the greatest intellects of the Kree race. They did not have the same capacity for emotions that humans did, and thus did not have the same predisposition for music. 

But Noh-Varr had always been different, even from the rest of his team aboard the Marvel. He was the angry one who would always then have to visit the Plex-counselors. 

Noh-Varr, like the rest of his team, was not only but Kree but genetically enhanced Kree. And one of their enhancements was that they had total control of their brains.

And emotions, after all, were just chemical reactions in the brain. Noh-Varr could choose whether or not to feel emotions. The other members of his crew chose not to feel emotion most of the time, but Noh-Varr _liked_ feeling emotion. He let himself be angry because he would rather feel angry than nothing at all. 

So that, he supposed, was why there was no music in his home dimension, and why he had come to love music so much. Music helped him _feel_. 

But he would never be able to understand human emotion. 

Noh-Varr felt emotion because he wanted to; because he chose to. But humans had no choice; their emotions were untameable things. And Noh-Varr would never be able to understand what that was like. He had emotions, but they weren’t the same. They did not rule him or drive his behavior. 

When the rest of his crewmates from _The Marvel_ had been killed when they were shot down over Earth, Noh-Varr had not mourned them, because mourning their deaths would not help him. But he had let himself be angry, because that anger helped him in his goal to take over the Earth and turn it into the new capital of the Kree Empire. 

He hadn’t been able to keep the anger up, though. Locked away in the Cube, his anger let go and no longer there to sustain him, no logical course of action available to him, he’d fallen into apathy, maybe even a kind of depression, because it was easier to just take what was coming to him than to fight it. There was no reason to fight it; he’d lost his purpose. 

It was during that period of apathy that the ward of the Cube was able to mess with his programming and control him. That had given him a new reason to be angry, after the Young Avengers had fixed him. 

The Skrull Invasion had given him a new reason to be angry, only to have that stripped away from him when he’d realized that not all Skrulls were abhorrent beings. Not all humans were abhorrent beings, either, and that had left him once again without anger and without purpose.

He’d tried to find a purpose in protecting the world as the Protector, joining the Avengers, but he couldn’t understand them. Their reasonings were for all their actions were so tangled up with feelings, massive knots of emotions he would never be able to replicate in his own brain. And it was his inability to understand the emotions of his teammates that had gotten him stranded on Hala, banned from Earth by the humans and being hunted down by the Kree. 

But it was because they’d expected him to be human, and he hadn’t met those expectations, that they’d left him there. He’d been thinking about things logically: the Kree had technology far superior to anything developed by humans, and he knew that what the humans had would not save them from the Phoenix Force. So he’d taken the essence of Phoenix Force the Avengers had managed to capture to the Supreme Intelligence, knowing that they could help.

But the Supreme Intelligence was even more logical than he, and would have let the Phoenix Force destroy Earth to study the cosmic being further, and Noh-Varr let himself become angry at the idea of living among the Kree again, of being told to keep himself from feeling. 

And so he’d escaped the Kree, knowing he could steal enough technology to build a device to trap the Phoenix Force. 

But the Avengers were angry, furious at him without reason, their emotions so caught up in the issue that they couldn’t see that they had no hope of defeating it on their own. 

They’d banned him from Earth, and he’d watched them go, resigning himself to watching their race, their planet, go up in flames. 

It had been pure chance that had saved them, but he was glad he was able to return, without their knowledge, and discover music. 

He hadn’t understood what he’d done wrong until he discovered all the complex emotions contained in the humans’ music, activating areas of his brain he hadn’t known existed. It was music that taught him to feel more than anger, hatred, and confusion. It had been music that had taught him what it felt like to truly love—not what he’d thought he’d felt for Annie, the first human to be genuinely kind to him—and what it felt like to truly hurt beyond the physical. 

Noh-Varr had never thought he’d enjoy pain. 

But there was beauty in the kind of emotional pain that humans felt, and Noh-Varr relished in it. 

He’d loved Kate because she was human, had lost her because he wasn’t human, had ruminated in morosity after their breakup because he’d wanted to feel human. 

He’d given that up when he’d realized that he never would, and he didn’t truly want to be.

He had never envied them anything but their emotional capacity, and eventually he realized that he didn’t even envy them that. Their music let him feel of it what he wished, but it never blinded him like it did them. 

They found it necessary to construct the world around them, to build themselves a house of beliefs, a floor under their feet to support and reassure them. They created for themselves deities, gods, higher purposes because they could not find enough purpose in themselves or each other. They need to believe that they were loved, that the chaos of the world had order, even if they had to put that blind faith in a made-up god. 

The Kree had a mathematical formula that disproved the existence of any deities, and they learned it at the age that human children learned not to soil themselves. The Kree possessed to blind faith to place in anything, desiring only scientific truths, and Noh-Varr had seen too much of too many worlds to believe that there was any order or meaning to the universe. 

He was freefalling in a way that would drive any human being insane, and he was okay. He was not human. 

All he believed in was himself, and his ability, which was enough to power the Kirby Engines. He did not lack for imagination, within the realm of science. He’d seen so much, been to so many worlds, possessed so much knowledge of technology, that his imagination of what was possible stretched far past human comprehension. 

Traveling with the Young Avengers across the Multiverse, though, he’d discovered that the Kirby Engines could feed off an unfounded faith in the abilities of others just as well. 

Traveling with the Young Avengers across the Multiverse, he’d never wanted so badly to be human, to connect to them the way they connected to each other, a way in which he’d never connected to anyone. 

Traveling with the Young Avengers across the Multiverse, he’d never been so acutely aware of the fact that he wasn’t human. 

He’d tried, though. Dating Kate was him trying. Growing a beard was him trying. He’d almost convinced himself he could be human.

It had taken the return of Oubliette to remind him that he wasn’t, that he could never be. To remind him of what it was like to be Kree, to have a purpose.

It had been so long ago that he’d felt he had a purpose. He’d been craving it, but hadn’t acknowledged it. 

He was Kree, and he didn’t have to feel any emotion, but the craving for a purpose was buried deep down in his genes, the instinct that made Kree come together for a common goal, a higher purpose, feel kinship to each other so deep that it never saw the difference in whether their skin was pink or blue. 

He was craving a kinship he thought he saw in the Young Avengers, but which was different from the kinship humans felt to each other. It wasn’t emotional.

He noticed this when the Mother caused representations of their parents to manifest, and he was the only one unrattled. 

He noticed this in the determination with which Billy chased the trail of his missing brother across the Multiverse. 

He noticed this in the way Billy and Teddy loved each other, even the way they doubted each other. 

The Avengers talking and laughing in front of him and Kate hanging on his arm was the third-most alienated Noh-Varr had ever felt. (The first was when he’d first landed on Earth, the second when the Avengers had left him on a foreign Hala to flee the unfamiliar Kree.)

Kate was the only ‘true human’ among them. She didn’t have superpowers, just her characteristically human determination to be a superhero without any. And Noh-Varr should have known that it would never have worked out between them; she was so, so human, seeming to embody the best characteristics of their race, the same characteristics that, because he lacked, made him forever a persona non grata. 

(If he had to choose a song for Kate, it would be “Make It, Take It” by Amanda Blank.) 

He’d thought he’d at least be able to connect with Prince Dorrek VIII, the son of Captain Mar-vell, but he was quite possibly the most human of them all. 

He was half Kree, but he was also half Skrull, and Skrulls specialized in blind faith and being members of races different from themselves, and doing so even better than actual members of the race. 

Dorrek VIII was more Skrull and human than Kree. All he seemed to have inherited from his Kree father was his strength, and the desire to love. 

(If he had to choose a song for Teddy, it would be “Hall Of Fame” by The Script.) 

If anyone of them knew what it was like to be alone in the world, alone in capability, it was either Billy or Tommy. Because even though America was from another dimension, similar to Noh-Varr himself, she was still human, and she seemed to have the ability to carve herself a place there, a place anywhere, just by breathing; just by existing, and she strongarmed wherever she was into her home, as comfortable in any given place as she was anywhere else. 

(If he had to choose a song for America, it would be “Woman (Oh Mama)” by Joy Williams.) 

Billy and Tommy, though, were on levels wholly belonging to themselves. Billy, with the fabric of reality at his fingertips, the closest thing to a god that humans would ever know (if he had to choose a song for Billy, it would be “Circles” by KDrew), and Tommy, who moved too fast for even Noh-Varr to see and lived in a world that nobody else could possibly imagine (if he had to choose a song for Tommy, it would be “Run Boy Run” by Woodkid). 

But for all their power, they were still human, and they were caught up in their own heads with demons Noh-Varr could not pretend to have met, their powers nearly too great for their minds and bodies. 

Noh-Varr thought maybe he’d be able to connect to Prodigy, who also knew more than almost everyone else around them, but David’s mutant powers had not only a possession of facts and skills, but of emotions as well, and if there was one thing he didn’t know, it was what it was like to not be human—because mutants were still human, no matter what anyone of either subspecies said. 

David may have known every trick to controlling his human emotions, and if Noh-Varr had a difficult enough time understanding emotions when they were openly displayed, it was even harder when they were hidden.

(He doesn’t know what song he’d choose for David, and that, perhaps more than anything else, should have alerted him to the fact that they’d never connect over anything more than some simple human technology.) 

(Tommy had once jokingly suggested that David’s theme song should be “Technologic” by Daft Punk. David had not seemed unimpressed.) 

And then there was Loki, who existed to manipulate the emotions of those around him and use that to his advantage. 

Loki was no deity, but a story woven from human belief, the same power that fed the Kirby engines. He was a story, an embodiment of particular human characteristics, human emotions. He knew how humans worked, what made them tick, more than any human ever could. 

(If he had to choose a song for Loki, it would “Morning Mr. Magpie” by Radiohead.) 

“What do you want most, Noh?” Loki had asked, his smile all light and his eyes all calculations. “If anyone can help you obtain it, it’s Loki, trust me!” 

Noh-Varr had looked into green eyes so different from his own—darker, with countless shades and nuances. And Noh-Varr had wondered: _What do I want most?_

He wanted more of the only thing that made him feel like he wasn’t completely alone. 

(Sometimes Noh-Varr felt like his life was “Headphones” by Britt Nicole, “Headphones” by Matt Nathanson, “Headphones” by Mounties.) 

“I want more music,” he’d said, and Loki had looked at him sideways, laughed, and introduced him to My Chemical Romance and Nothing But Thieves. 

Humans may have been strange, but _hot damn_ did Noh-Varr love their music and love their language. 

Human language was so gloriously _vague_ , and Noh-Varr loved to abuse it: “When you betray us, I am going to end you. And it’s gonna be really, really gross. And you’re gonna be really, really sad.” 

You couldn’t say that in Kree. In Kree, you would say, “When you betray us, I am going to impale my hand into your chest, pull out two of your ribs, and then use them to stab you in the eyes.” 

But that was still a loose and simplified translation, because in Kree there were different words for “when,” depending on how distant from the present the specified period of time would be; different words for “betray” depending on who was being betrayed, whether it was singular or plural, whether it was personal or against the Kree Empire; different words for “impale” and “stab” depending on the expected velocity of the actions. 

And not only did Kree have different types lexicon, Kree also had different phonetics, different phonology, different morphology, different syntax, different semantics. 

Not only that, but any given word of Kree had many layers of meaning; Kree, unlike humans who could only switch quickly between tasks, were perfectly capable of performing multiple tasks at once, and their language reflected that. If, for example, a Kree was simultaneously thinking about the weather, plotting out the ship’s trajectory, and planning what they were going to cook for dinner, they could say, in a single word, that it was likely to rain, the mathematical formula being used to identify the physics of the ship, and they were planning on cooking lasagna but didn’t have all the ingredients. (Not that Kree cooked lasagna, of course—creative food was another thing that humans did far better than Kree, mostly because they had more delicate digestive systems and more particular senses of taste.) 

Noh-Varr still thought in Kree much of the time, and his brain was always, always running mathematical calculations on what he was seeing; a verifiable physics engine. When he paused before speaking, it was because he was translating his thoughts to English; when you thought in several dimensions, it was not always easy to translate those thoughts into a language where you could only ever say one thing at once. 

Not to mention how difficult single concepts could be to translate on their own. 

In Kree, there was a word for the knowledge that you were the only you in the entire Multiverse, and that even though there were other yous in other universes, they were not you because they had not had the same experiences, and that you were not the same person you were in the past nor the person you would be in the future, because your experiences had changed you, and that you could never trust to be completely understood by anyone, not even other versions of yourself, because they had not experienced the same things you had. 

There was no word for that in English. If there was, though, Noh-Varr thought it would hold an undertone of vast loneliness. 

The word played in his mind over and over when he was falling asleep, setting itself to a human melody. 

The entire rest of the 18th Kree Diplomatic Gestalt from Universe-200080 had died, and with them, the only people who had shared those experiences with him. And everything he’d been through on Earth-616, and in the dimensions he’d traveled to with the Young Avengers, had set him even further apart from any Kree of his homeworld. 

He did not belong anywhere, but that was not why he stayed on Earth-616, when he could build a ship that could take him to any dimension, to any time period. And he did not stay on Earth-616 for their music, despite what he might have told Kate. 

No, he stayed because the humans of Earth-616 fascinated him. 

Their world was so tumultuous, always on the verge of ending; being conquered, being destroyed. Each time, thus far, they had pulled through, somewhat the worse for wear, somewhat stronger than before, somehow still divided. 

Noh-Varr wanted to see if they could stand it; if they would ever rise above it. With his extended lifespan—his cells never aged—he could afford to wait thousands of years to see what would become of humans. 

He doubted they’d last that long, but it would interesting to see. They were just starting to grasp space travel; it could be that, if they could unite, they could spread their race through the galaxy, create an empire like the Skrull and the Kree. 

Or maybe they’d be destroyed, either from some outer force they could not unite themselves against, but a common enemy was the only thing to even unite them. 

No, Noh-Varr thought that they’d be the ones to destroy themselves. As long as the world was ending, they’d be able to pull together. It was a period of peace that he didn’t think they could handle; there’d be nothing to keep them from turning against each other. 

They already had the power to destroy the planet several times over. Nuclear bombs, however rudimentary, were not lacking in destructive capacity. If they unleashed one, they’d unleash others, and if the explosions didn’t kill them, the radiation would. 

Maybe the Hulks would be okay, and the cockroaches. But the Hulks could still probably starve to death.

The cockroaches, though. They’d find something to feed on. They’d find some way to stay alive—they always would; Noh-Varr included. 

Though when all the humans were gone, Earth-616 would hardly be worth watching. Noh-Varr would take what he’d collected of their music, log the information he’d gathered on his Plex drive, and move on to a new world, a new dimension, to carry on the scientific study that he’d started with the 18th Kree Diplomatic Gestalt after they’d been lost in the multiverse after a clash with three Astro-Gods. 

Their original mission had, of course, only been as peacekeepers to maintain the cease-fire between the Kree and the Skrulls. However, when they’d become lost, they’d given themselves a new mission, and taken it upon themselves to study the dimensions they came across. All the information they gathered would be of use to the Kree Empire of their homeworld. 

And that, Noh-Varr realized, is what he needed to do; yes, he was lost, but he would keep studying the worlds he came across, and maybe he would slowly make his way back to Hala.

Hala did, after all, translate loosely into English as: “the place to which I will always return.”

But the only place Noh-Varr felt like he would ever belong was with his ears pressed up against the speakers of a pair of headphones, the music turned up just loud enough to drown out everything else.

And in the dark club with its dancing lights and heady bass beat, nobody who saw him standing at the DJ table—shirtless with neon-green headphones over his ears and a soft smile on his lips—would have suspected that he wasn’t human. 

But even if he told them he was a Kree from a different dimension, and even if they believed it, they’d still never realize just how alien he really was.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Notes on cockroaches:** Excerpt from _Wikipedia_ : 
> 
> Cockroaches are among the hardiest insects. Some species are capable of remaining active for a month without food and are able to survive on limited resources, such as the glue from the back of postage stamps. Some can go without air for 45 minutes. Japanese cockroach (Periplaneta japonica) nymphs, which hibernate in cold winters, survived twelve hours at −5°C to −8°C in laboratory experiments.
> 
> Experiments on decapitated specimens of several species of cockroach found a variety of behavioral functionality remained, including shock avoidance and escape behavior, although many insects other than cockroaches are also able to survive decapitation, and popular claims of the longevity of headless cockroaches do not appear to be based on published research The severed head is able to survive and wave its antennae for several hours, or longer when refrigerated and given nutrients.
> 
> It is popularly suggested that cockroaches will "inherit the earth" if humanity destroys itself in a nuclear war. Cockroaches do indeed have a much higher radiation resistance than vertebrates, with the lethal dose perhaps six to 15 times that for humans. However, they are not exceptionally radiation-resistant compared to other insects, such as the fruit fly.
> 
> The cockroach's ability to withstand radiation better than human beings can be explained through the cell cycle. Cells are most vulnerable to the effects of radiation when they are dividing. A cockroach's cells divide only once each time it molts, which is weekly at most in a juvenile roach. Since not all cockroaches would be molting at the same time, many would be unaffected by an acute burst of radiation, but lingering radioactive fallout would still be harmful.
> 
> * * *
> 
> So what I mentioned about cockroaches surviving the nuclear apocalypse here is not really correct. Suspension of disbelief, if you please—maybe Earth-616 cockroaches are special! Which I don’t think is that much of a stretch—Earth-616 is pretty frikkin’ bonkers. 
> 
> Anyways, this story kinda turned into a character exploration/headcanon elaboration. Hopefully it wasn’t too boring… I don’t even know anymore.


End file.
